Resident Theologian
About the Blog
Aping the Inklings
A plea—to myself first, then to others—to stop centering the Inklings and other “modern classics” as the north star for popular Christian writing today.
Well-adjusted
Two quotes from C. S. Lewis and Stanley Hauerwas on Christ, pastoral care, and being “well-adjusted.”
A therapeutic church is an atheist church
Reflecting on recent writing by Richard Beck and Jake Meador on functional atheism and the therapeutic turn in contemporary church life and teaching.
I’m in LARB on Hauerwas, Barth, and Christendom
This morning Los Angeles Review of Books published an essay review of mine on Stanley Hauerwas’s latest book, which came out earlier this year, titled Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth.
Tech for normies
On Monday The New Atlantis published my review essay of Andy Crouch’s new book, The Life We’re Looking For. The next day I wrote up a longish blog post responding to my friend Jeff Bilbro’s comment about the review, which saw a discrepancy between some of the critical questions I closed the essay with and an essay I wrote last year on Wendell Berry. Yesterday I wrote a seemingly unrelated post about the difference between radical churches (urban monastics, intentional communities, house churches, all to varying degrees partaking of the Hauerwasian or Yoderian style of ecclesiology) and what I called “church for normies.”
Church for normies
In his book Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction, Nicholas Healy raises an objection with Hauerwas’s ecclesiology. He argues that Hauerwas’s rhetoric and sometimes his arguments present the reader with a church fit only for faithful Christians—that is, for heroes and saints, for super-disciples, for the extraordinarily obedient, the successful, the satisfactory. By contrast, Healy argues that the church ought to be a home and a haven for “unsatisfactory Christians,” and that our doctrine of the church ought to reflect that.
“The slow death of the Protestant churches”
Fifteen years ago, in a journal article on Karl Barth’s christology and Chalcedonian doctrine (among other things), Bruce McCormack concluded his article with the following paragraph (my emphasis): It remains only to say a word about the situation—and the motives which have led me to elaborate precisely this form of Christology in the present moment. The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches.